Convert Cabinet Shelves To Drawers

How to take an existing cabinet shelf and convert it to a pull out cabinet drawer.

Convert cabinet shelves to drawers.

The most useful rollout shelves and drawers are the ones closest to the floor since these eliminate the most awkward bending and crouching. My wife and i loved the other project we did this one that i decided to expend it to other parts of the kitchen. See the ikea products chris used. We were able to keep all the original doors intact by swapping in hinges with a wider door opening angle to give the drawers the freedom to pull out.

Then remove the shelf. If it s made from particleboard we recommend that you replace it with 3 4 in. Having kitchen cabinets from ikea made this conversion simple as we just had to invest in some rationell extending drawers. The 2 1 2inch divider was.

Then remove the hinges from the door. Your drawer front and slides can t extend beyond those marks or you ll spend hours building a drawer that won t open. If you can build a simple drawer box the rest will be easy. To save time and materials i reused the existing trays modifying as necessitated by the slide hardware.

Reinstall the cabinet door onto the cabinet and repeat this process for every cabinet door in the kitchen. Last winter as part of a kitchen remodel in which i removed the cabinets i had made a dozen years earlier and refinished them i converted a two door cabinet with pullout trays to a drawer cabinet. For the drawer slides start by removing the drawers and slides from the cabinet using the screwdriver. A terrible messy lower cabinet that seems to just fill to the brim with everything.

Do one cabinet at a time and keep track of the order of the drawers being pulled from that one cabinet as they can vary in size. We can fix this. We all have this. In this project we will be replacing existing lower cabinets with drawers start by taking off the doors and the divider.

The sides of our custom drawers are made from 5 8 thick 11 ply baltic birch plywood while the bottoms of the rollout drawers are made from thick white melamine great for easy cleaning. If want to limit your time and money investment you ll get the most bang for your buck by retrofitting these areas first with slide out cabinet shelves. The construction of every aspect of the drawers is top notch and we guarantee our drawers to hold up to 100lbs. Plywood and transfer the marks to the new shelf.

I reused the shelf making it the drawer bottom so all you have to do is get wood for the sides and drawer slides.